Bryony Lavery's 1997 play
is an
intense, inward-looking three-hander (There are also a couple of
silent extras, giving the understudies stage time) whose power is
dissipated somewhat in the cavernous Haymarket Theatre. Still, enough
of its passions and ideas remain to make a moving and
thought-provoking evening.

Drawing on a number of
published sources
(to the extent of being faced with charges of plagiarism) Lavery
tells of the abduction and murder of a child, and of the twenty-year
after-effects on the murderer, the child's mother and an academic
studying the case.

Her title suggests both
that all three have their
lives stopped and defined by that one event and that all three have
to develop emotion-suppressing coldness to cope with the
horror.

The
murderer (Jason Watkins) is a true sociopath, who sees no moral
content to his action at all, and can only think in terms of efficiency
and OCD-like neatness. The grieving mother (Suranne Jones)
directs all her passion into becoming a professional grieving mother,
giving speeches and heading related charities.

And the psychologist
(Nina Sosanya) retreats into academic objectivity, using this case as
evidence for her theory that serial killers are all victims of
physically malformed or damaged brains.

All three characters have
some difficulty maintaining their dispassionate masks, which is
another way of saying all three actors get to do things that actors
love to do – alternate between subtle indications of repressed
passions and complete emotional breakdowns.

And all three actors –
and, because all three are skilled performers, the audience as well –
have obvious fun exercising their craft.

Watkins in particular is
chilling as a very ordinary and nondescript little man who happens to
kill children whenever the mood strikes him. But Sosanya lets us
sense, without ever spelling it out, that the academic is struggling
to convince herself as much as anyone else of her neat psychological
theories.

And, playing the one
character who is allowed to grow and
change in the course of the play's twenty years, Jones makes
believable both the extent and limit of her transformation.

Jonathan
Munby's direction and Paul Wills' design sometimes threaten to
overpower both play and actors in the need to fill the large
Haymarket stage.

But keep your eye on the
three principals, and on
the skill of their performances as much as the story they're telling,
and Frozen will reward you.